Aside from maintaining my private teaching studio, I remain active as a performer. My solo and collaborative performances have taken me into many cities across Canada and USA. As a native of Finland, I enjoy promoting Finnish and Scandinavian composers and bringing this repertoire to new audiences in North America. Since I moved to Canada 15 years ago, I have had many opportunities to perform at various North American Finnish cultural festivals.

My interest in Finnish piano music lead to a recording project to produce my debut CD, Jean Sibelius - Compositions for Piano. This recording highlights some rarely heard solo piano pieces by a Finnish composer Jean Sibelius who is mainly known for his large scale orchestral works. This recording project offered a great opportunity for me to discover lesser known piano works by Sibelius as well as to include some of my own favorites.

I greatly enjoy collaborating with other musicians and while living in Toronto I had a pleasure of working closely with a friend and a colleague, soprano Cindy Koistinen. For several years we performed as Duo Freya in many cities across Canada including Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa, Sudbury, and Sault St. Marie. Our collaboration produced another recording, Diamonds of the North – Songs from Scandinavia.This recording features a collection of songs composed by some of the Scandinavian master composers. According to the Wholenote Magazine “this recording of Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian music for voice and piano is truly full of little musical diamonds – and a rich introduction to the world of Nordic art song.”

In 2016, I was honored to be invited to perform in a composer portrait concert in Toronto that showcased compositions by a promising Finnish composer Tomi Räisänen. In this concert I gave the North American premiere for his solo piano work Ouvrez la Tête. Year 2017 culminated in a performance of Finnish music with a violinist Jari Suomalainen at the Suomi 100 Gala in Silicon Valley that celebrated the 100 years of Independence of Finland.

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What Parents Are Saying:

"Ms. Saario is both kind and caring teacher as well as a highly professional and inspirational role model as a pianist. I am amazed by how she has gently further built my daughter’s love for playing and motivation to practice frequently. In her supervision, my daughter’s technical skills and musical expression has elevated greatly. I think Ms. Saario is the kind of teacher that any piano student would be lucky to have!"-Parent of a 12-year-old student